Choppy Live TV on ATV4 and IOS

Channels Apple TV
#1

Not sure if this is a bug or not. With this latest update, playing Live TV on ATV4 or IOS, Channels lags a bit, somewhat choppy in the stream. It takes a few seconds longer to acquire a stream, comes on screen, pauses a moment to buffer, then starts playing again. After a few seconds, it buffers again, then it’ll play but seems like it’s laggy the rest of the way. Happens in IOS as well.

Recordings playback in the same fashion on ATV4 and IOS.

In Plex, recordings playback just fine. I’ve tested the HDHomeRun desktop app on MacOS, it streams Live TV just fine. Using two of my Samsung TV’s, one wired and one wireless, I’ll select a HDHomeRun tuner in the Source, pick a channel, and those stream Live TV just fine as well.

No changes have been made to my network. I’ve narrowed this down to just the Channels app on my ATV4 and IOS clients. Any ideas?

#2

Hmm, that’s strange.

On the Settings tab of the app, is Tuner Sharing off? And Home Streaming set to Original?

#3

Logged out of Remote DVR and that fixed it, but then didn’t have access to the DVR or recordings at all. Logged back in, and it’s lagging again. When logging back into remote DVR, I noticed the IP it wanted me to enter in the browser was not the same as my server.

#4

Sounds like your Bonjour settings aren’t working, so the app isn’t able to discover the DVR in your home.

Open the DVR app on your NAS, and uncheck then recheck the Bonjour checkbox. Also copy/paste what it says underneath.

#5

That’s exactly what I did, turned off bonjour, then turned off remote DVR under it, then re-enabled both. All is working good now, much appreciated.

1 Like
#6

If Bonjour isn’t working and Channels gets the WAN address of the DVR then the router will port forward internally rather than go out to the internet. The buffering I guess is that it will use the apps “internet” transcoding options rather than “home” setting. Is there a way to get the DVR detect the Channels app is coming from the same subnet in this circumstance and use the “home” setting? For DVR users that would mean Bonjour wouldn’t be needed at all and it has been a source of issues on certain systems for a while.

For example if I have a power cut the DVR comes up automatically before my router (Google WiFi) and the computer doesn’t have an IP address for Channels to register to. The Bonjour IP is empty []. I have to toggle it off and on again in the webui. The computer is DHCP with a reserved address in the router. I could change the computer to use a static address but I haven’t.

#7

I’ve been working on a Bonjour rewrite which can automatically deal with IP changes as well as multiple network interfaces. It’s turned into a big project but I’m making progress.

#8

This seems like a bug… what linux distro are you using? The startup scripts should be configured to wait for network access before bringing up the DVR.

#9

Debian 9.1

#10

I’m having similar issues… watching live tv or recordings is almost pointless most of the time… Live or playback is choppy… Apple TV 4, IOS, etc… I can, however, use HDHomerun that same time on any of my IOS devices and live tv runs just fine…

I’ll turn off sharing what should I do with the steaming setting?

#11

Turn off tuner sharing (or connect your DVR computer via ethernet), and leave the streaming quality at original.